So, my friend decided that he would be more than happy to let me try it on his PC. After all, he was just as excited about Linux as I was, after I showed him what it was capable of. I chose this particular distro because of it's 'works-out-of-the-box' approach...
Why is Sabayon better than the leading Ubuntu LiveCD?
Ubuntu, after installing, cannot play mp3 audio, video files, and DVDs. You need to manually install codecs by connecting to the net (although this manual procedure has been made easier in the Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu 7.04). Sabayon on the other hand, automatically comes preloaded with these codecs out-of-the-box.
Ubuntu also comes with Compiz; a range of 3D Desktop Effects. These are disabled by default but can easily be enabled after logging in. Sabayon on the other hand comes with the superior (albeit unstable) Beryl effects preloaded and automatically enabled. For those who have not yet seen Beryl in action, watch a video of it now. It makes Vista and OSX look pale in comparison. Sabayon is one of the very few distros that allow Beryl to work straight off the CD, meaning nothing is installed on to the hard disk.
Finally Sabayon (the full DVD edition) comes with a plethora of software - more than you'll ever need. Want to use a web browser? Pick between Firefox, Seamonkey, Epiphany and Dillo to name a few. And Sabayon looks stunning with its dark theme.
So there we were, burning the ISO to disk (which we had to do twice - crappy CD-RWs) and booting up from the drive. Bootup was slightly slow, but we did finally reach the login screen. Since this was the miniEdition, we had only KDE and Fluxbox to choose from; naturally we went with KDE. Rest assured, the DVD version comes with Gnome and probably Xfce on top. Beryl worked, to our delight, perfectly. The only problem was that it lagged a bit, but bear in mind that this was running from CD. I'm pretty sure that it would work fine once installed. Beryl is pretty and we spent almost an hour just playing with the settings manager to experiment.
Once we had finished, we went back to the car, where two more of my friends were waiting, bored shitless for the past hour and a half. They kindly informed us how they had entertained themselves by thinking up suggestions of what we were doing for so long in my friend's bedroom (it's OK, we responded by asking them why the car had been rocking).
Just when I finally decided that Sabayon deserved to be installed fully onto the PC, my friend decides that he wants to upgrade to Vista, so has asked me to postpone the installation. Asshole.
